A New World Order
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A New World Order ranges widely across the Atlantic World that Caryl Phillips has charted in his award winning novels and non-fiction during the course of the past twenty years. He begins this collection by establishing his belief that there is a 'new world order' of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips writes about the moment when St Kitts, the small island of his birth, became independent and talks about the role and responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic. He then turns the spotlight on Britain speculating about his parents' migration in the late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he both of, and not of, Britain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exploring issues of colonialism and race in literature, novelist Phillips (The Nature of Blood) here brings together 32 essays, book reviews, articles, interviews and introductions, divided into four sections the "Africa" of his ancestry, the "Caribbean" of his birth, the "Britain" of his upbringing and the "United States" where he now resides. The American writers he treats (Baldwin, Wright, Wideman) are well-known, and Fanon, Gordimer and Kincaid have been widely read here, but most of Phillips's attention is given to less popular writers from his other homes the French- as well as the English-speaking Caribbean: Glissant, Chamoiseau, along with Walcott and Lamming; the South African Coetzee and the Nigerian Soyinka; from Britain, the 18th-century Sancho and the 21st-century Zadie Smith. Usually collegial in tone and fresh in language ("a 'broken-backed' novel which has the feel of two books"), the essays incorporate biographical sketches and concise detail, along with ruminative commentary. Phillips breaks out of the review mode with treatments of three disparate figures who are "of and not of" where they find themselves: C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul and Marvin Gaye. Here, as in his introductions, his evocative and provocative ("Race posturing in the United States is now the national sport") voices have freer play. Phillips emended most of the essays, many of which appeared in periodicals not easily available in the U.S. If a new world order doesn't quite emerge, a nuanced set of literary and cultural engagements does.
